The pure argon-blue surface of the earth hurtled slowly past below, half in darkness, its shadow waiting to envelop a little resupply station orbiting 22,300 miles from the planet, in GEO orbit with the equatorial city of Macapá, Brazil. There, ships on their way to the Mars cities or Jupiter’s moons or the hyperspace tunnel to Aldebaran stopped by to resupply and get repairs. While the resupply routines were completely automated — flexible steel tubes connected magnetically to umbilical ports and fed in all the raw material the ships’ captains paid for — repairs needed to be actually done by hand. Outside the environmental barrier of Nigel Akender’s MMRE machine, a ship on docking pylon Kappa slowly leaked the noxious stench of fuel into space; inside of it there was nothing but the clean nonsmell of purified recycled air, the comfortable hum of life-support systems, and the beginnings of a dull ache in his shoulders.

He wrapped gloved fingers around air, watching his MMRE’s hand through his visiplate as, miming his action, it grasped a thick bundle of optic fiber cables. He concentrated briefly on connecting the bundle to its terminal inside a freshly repaired sensor pallet, using the visiplate as a magnifying glass, then closed the cover and stretched.

“Tank to Jet. You done there already?” a velvety voice asked over his radio link. The voice belonged to Katleen Plarqis, Nigel’s partner in the business. She also commandeered a MMRE — an Emry, as Nigel referred to them — but of a different design; while Nigel’s allowed him to make delicate repairs and move rapidly, hers was a slower model that did heavy-duty work, at least the sort that required more mechanical strength than Nigel’s was capable of. Both named their robots according to their capabilities; hers was strong and slow so she named it Tank, and his was quick and agile so he named it Jet. They used those names as callsigns when communicating during repair jobs.

“Yep. How ’bout you?” Nigel returned.

Katleen sighed. “I could use a hand here.”

Nigel pushed off from the surface of the ship and fired maneuvering jets, skimming around the hull to where Katleen was hanging upside-down from its belly, trying to bend a hull plate into position and weld it down at the same time. Nigel reoriented himself and touched down on the hull, activating small electromagnets in the feet so he could walk over and step on the plate to keep it down. It only took her half a minute to close the seam that way.

She turned off the microwelder and stood up, Tank mimicking her when, inside the cockpit, she ran one hand through her hair. “That’s the last one,” she said, relieved.

“Great. Now for the fuel leak,” Nigel announced in a mock-cheerful voice.

“Oh, great. I love fuel leaks.”

“Yeah, I know.”

They set to work. Together they had the fuel leak contained within a few minutes, using microtractor beams and containment fields to maneuver the frozen fuel droplets into a single large lump. Once the surrounding space was clean, they began the repair in tandem, alternating short shifts when other ships docked at the station for other necessities besides refueling and resupplying. Nigel and Katleen took pride in knowing that their orbital complex was the only one of some sixteen similar stations that could be efficiently maintained by only two people. The other stations required a minimum of six people, and a few up to ten, to take care of all the jobs that a resupply station needed to provide. Nigel’s station was also the only one that provided fully automated service via an interactive graphical station-to-ship interface, a program that electronically linked itself to a ship’s computer and, by means of a limited-access inventory, let the ships’ captains order up and pay for the supplies and service they needed without having to wait any longer than it took for the transfer to take place. The upper six of the station’s twelve docking pylons, coded Alpha through Zeta, faced space and were entirely automated, reserved for quick in-and-out stopovers. The other six pylons faced Earth and were used for repairs, increasing in order of urgency and complexity, so minor repairs went to pylons Eta and Theta, more serious jobs to Iota and Kappa, and the worst to Lambda and Mu, this last one being used expressly for immediate and possibly life-threatening-emergency repairs… if it ever came to that. All the pylons were automated; the repair pylons Eta and Theta usually handled all the repairs by themselves. Once in a while an odd one came along and Nigel or Katleen would attend to it personally. The other four repair pylons could only handle so much, so both of them spent most of their time seeing to repairs on the ships docked at those pylons, among them the fuel leak on pylon Kappa.

They worked steadily for almost an hour; the job would certainly have taken less time if they had merely patched the fuel valve and refilled the cisterns with fresh fuel; but they did not repair the simple fuel valve, they replaced it altogether with a new triple-sealed pneumatic inlet port Nigel had designed when he got tired of repairing fuel leaks day after day. The new inlet’s triple seals safeguarded against the leaks that plagued the old spring-sealed designs, were equally compatible with standard fueling nozzles, and were installed for a fee that was only a fraction of their cost of production. Nigel didn’t care, as long as the new valves worked and they could at least go half a day without having a ship come in leaking fuel.

They locked the new valve into place just as Earth bit Sol. They’d just finished work on the only ship docked at their station; for at least fifteen hours, they could have some rest. Ships rarely ever docked at stations in darkside, something Nigel attributed to the natural human cycle of lowering activity while it was dark. Nigel looked forward to indulging himself in a few hours of lowered activity; in any case, he watched the last ship float away without really seeing it. He hung in space for a few moments before twisting about and propelling himself toward the hangar in the side of the station, where he and Katleen housed their Emries.

“Hey, Nigel,” Katleen greeted him when he pulled himself up into the living quarters in the core of the station. “Hot chocolate?”

Nigel nabbed the flying nodule with both hands gratefully. “Thanks, Kat,” he said, and took a pull. “Mm, good.” Nigel sighed and drifted slowly through a short hallway to the control room, a low cylindrical chamber almost entirely lined with monitors and consoles. Nigel hooked himself into the seat before the main board and punched three buttons together, the first of a long-established routine of self-diagnostics he ran the whole station through every ‘night.’ As he pressed button combinations at irregular intervals, he savored the sweet hot chocolate and listened to Katleen prepare for bed, where she sometimes inventoried supplies when she was not too tired. Nigel knew she wouldn’t be inventorying tonight. She looked about as exhausted as he felt, both of them looking forward to a full day of rest after a long day and a long week.

Nigel almost finished the diagnostics with his eyes closed, but he liked to watch the computer run down the lists and give him neat rows of solid greens, with no angry scarlet  WARNING, SYSTEM ERROR gaps whatsoever. The station was silent now, as silent as it would ever get with the environmental systems and processors running. The diagnostics were done, flawless as usual, so Nigel twisted lazily out of the chair and swam down to the sleeping quarters, where he took just long enough to strip off the blue mesh suit and his shirt before diving into his sleeping cocoon, releasing a deep content sigh.

He was asleep for only a second — though it was really more than half an hour — before an alarm erupted into staccato blasts. The noise yanked Nigel abruptly out of sleep, leaving him disoriented for a second; he was out of the cocoon and in the control room a second after that. He slapped the communications button to see a slightly fuzzy and deeply creased face on the comm terminal, topped by a gray cap and adorned with a graying goatee. A darkened bridge was visible beyond it, intermittently irradiated by a dull crimson light.

“Nigel, help me!” said the man, who Nigel recognized as his old friend Rovidiam Karastas the moment he said Nigel’s name. “Something’s gone wrong with the engine. We’re stranded out here, we don’t have thrusters! The engine’s leaking radiation — nobody’s gonna go down and fix it. You’re the closest station I could find. Please!”

“All right,” Nigel said, stalling for an instant in which to think. Rovi had certainly taken all precautions already to shield as much of the ship as he could; Nigel did not need to ask. A more pressing issue was that Nigel knew Rovi’s ship was equipped with two two-person escape pods, and Rovi was in neither one. Nigel could think of only two reasons for that: either both pods were unusable, which was unlikely, or Rovi once again had taken on too many passengers and had already ejected both pods. It would have made Nigel mad if he weren’t so worried. “All right, Rovi. I’m heading out there. Give me your coordinates. Meanwhile keep everybody as far away from the engine as you can. Let me in when you see me coming.”

Rovi nodded and pressed a sequence of buttons below the screen. A set of coordinates popped up on Nigel’s display, which he immediately shunted to the transmitter array, where he could pick them up with Jet. “I won’t be long.” Nigel promised. “Nigel out.” The screen blanked and Nigel turned to leave, almost running Katleen down in the process.

“Where are you going?”

“Rovi’s in trouble. I have his coords in the tranz. Go prep the hangar and give them to me as soon as I come out,” Nigel answered in one breath, while he yanked his mesh suit back on.

“I’m going with you.”

“No —”

“Don’t be macho. You need help? I want to be there. Besides … Rovi’s my friend too.”

Nigel stopped at the floor iris to the airlock, torn between taking or rejecting her offer. “Hurry,” he said at last. He and Katleen turned simultaneously in opposite directions, Katleen going for her own suit and Nigel once more to the control room, where he typed in four commands and a short delay time for each. He was in the Emries’ hangar instants later, scrambling into Jet’s cockpit. Jet and Tank launched together, both of them shifting to their vehicular mode and blasting off in the direction of Rovi Karastas’ scout ship.

Even at high acceleration, using their vehicular mode’s most powerful mag-drive thrusters, it took them three hours to cover the 400,000-kilometer distance to the ship. The stars, frozen at infinity, seemed to mock all efforts at speed by their illusion of motionlessness. Only the string of small red numbers incrementing rapidly in their visiplates reassured them of their very real progress.

Rovi’s ship, the High Dawn Seeker, appeared as yet another small bright yellow dot, enlarging quickly upon their approach. Nigel’s rapid morph from jump-jet to robot flipped him over like a diver spinning in midair; Tank’s morph rolled her over and seemed to stretch her out. She twisted and braked hard, watching Nigel guiding himself expertly to the hatch leading into the engine housing. Nigel took a scant second to be pleased when he twisted the locking mechanism and opened it without trouble: Rovi had opened the lock for him, as planned. Then he looked at the readings on his visiplate, particularly the one displaying the reading in rads pouring from the damaged engine, and shouted into his comm link, “Tank! Don’t come inside. There’s too much radiation. Stay outside, the engine casing will shield you. Just be ready to take care of any contingencies. Check!”

“Check,” came back Katleen’s voice. “Remaining outside. But what about you? The radiation — “

“I’m shielded.”

“What? How?”

“Did it myself. Switching freqs; gotta talk to Rovi. Over and out.” Nigel’s channel went silent.

Katleen’s comm link buzzed in her ear for a second with radio noise before she re-tuned it. She immediately switched freqs herself to Rovi’s channel, knowing she was cut off from Nigel’s bandwave by the ship’s radiation-shielded bulkheads. For a moment she was a little annoyed; why had Nigel not told her he had installed radiation shielding on Jet? As soon as she wondered that, she realized it must have been very recently; with or without telling her, most of the upgrades he made to Jet followed shortly on Tank, except for the few occasions her Emry’s structural limitations prevented it. In her ear, static joggled and jumped, followed by Rovi’s voice. She set herself in a slow orbit around the huge engine casing of the High Dawn Seeker, receiving almost continuous updates from him, alert but not sure just what she was watching for. Tank’s hand kept clanging against her visiplate every time Katleen nervously brushed off the hair from her face.

Inside the engine casing, Nigel was almost blinded by the energy leakage from the engine’s main power inlet conduit, the meter-thick tube marred by a long gash running sideways from one clamp ring to the next. Nigel knew immediately that it was a stress fracture and had to seal it before it leaked any more energy into the casing. So much free, raw energy reacting with the electromagnetic thruster fields it was supposed to power synergized into deadly radiation, shielded from the outside by the double burinium layers embedded in the casing — but that wouldn’t last long. The sensitivity of his visiplate adjusted automatically as he neared the gash, brightness falling logarithmically, where he saw that he had a compound problem: the gash had occurred in the conduit section immediately after the constricting-field regulator chamber, clearly indicating that not only was the conduit cracked, but the constrictor had also been damaged, leaving it wide open. If he did nothing but seal the gash, then all of the energy would be directed into the magnetic inducer coils and the ship would be blasted off so fast there would be nothing left of the crew, or himself, but large greasy spots on the walls. He had to repair the constrictor chamber first — but doing so necessitated leaving the gash open and leaking, building radiation that would slowly seep throughout the ship and eventually kill everybody on board, including Rovi —

He had no choice. He pulled himself toward the constrictor chamber and pulled the console cover off. He stared in horror: a third of the components were fused beyond recognition and much of what was left was either cracked or warped. He examined the damage for a few seconds, making decisions, and the first thing he did was pull free all of the fused slag that he could.

He had enough standard components in supply to replace almost all of the most severely damaged and now missing pieces, which he did. A plan was forming in his mind even as he desperately switched pieces, often simultaneously, and when he ran completely out of components he knew that the only ones he had purposely not replaced were the ones identical to the components in his own suit. The ones that were least damaged he jury-rigged to share the load, remembering that some of them were only redundant circuits not normally used; then he carefully stripped off a plate off the side of his suit and crosswired the components in that power unit into the entire array, enabling him to supply the constrictor chamber with power from his own suit.

He closed the circuit.

The bright energy leak went out with an almost palpable thump. His visiplate snapped up in sensitivity after a second, letting him see the engine chamber clearly, but the gauges still read dangerous levels of radiation. At least their source had been stopped. He opened the comm link to Tank, the transmission hissing strongly from lack of power.

“Tank! How are you doing out there? I’ve got the radiation leak stopped in here, but I’ve had to wire myself into the mag constrictor to stop it. We have to get this ship docked, pronto!“

Silence. Nigel was about to start shouting into his comm when he remembered that the radiation shielding in the engine casing also prevented standard radio transmissions. Muttering self-deprecating expletives, he switched to a narrower, slightly higher-powered band and repeated his message.

“Check that, Jet. Contacting Rovi now,” came the reply. Katleen’s link was silent for a few moments while she switched freqs, then his burst back to life, a shade fainter now. “Okay, Jet. He knows. I’m going to get the thrusters running again so we can start off for home. I’m going to route his comms through me so we can call a hauler to help. How’re you holding up?”

“ ’S OK, but I can’t talk much. I’ve taken everything but life support off-line so I can run on minimum power all the way to the station. That means no radio. Come get me when we’re there,” Nigel responded. His signal was breaking up.

Katleen managed to send him “Check — later,” before he broke contact.

Rovi, through Katleen, managed to contact a hauler ship not too far away. It intercepted them an hour and a quarter later, finding the High Dawn Seeker limping Earthward on reactor thrusters. Katleen had repaired them all in a short time, needing only to reweld the fuel conduits to the reactor chambers, an operation that took less than five minutes for each of the three thrusters.The hauler ship latched a tugspar onto the High Dawn Seeker’s nose and towed it at half-drive to the first station on lightside. There, with fresh supplies, Katleen crawled into the engine chamber and finished off the repairs, allowing Nigel to disconnect himself from the panel.

Except Nigel did not move. He merely drifted slowly away, trailing wires. The clang that resounded through the engine chamber when Jet’s shoulder glanced off a strut jerked Katleen from her numb dread and she lunged at Jet to catch him before he hit something else. She could not see inside the cockpit with its internal lights off, and she had to resist a sudden impulse to shake Jet, as she might a real human body, to rattle Nigel awake. Instead, she coiled Tank’s arms around Jet and pulled him out of the chamber, his motor servos frozen in position like a mechanical rigor mortis. She tried not to think of that.

The harsh white sunlight glinting off Jet’s and Tank’s metal bodies filled Rovi, watching from the safety of the station, with relief. If they were coming out that must mean the repairs were complete — but his relief vanished long before he saw that they did not separate. They had not been inside together long enough. Rovi’s growing puzzlement transformed into horror when he finally made out the detail of the two machines’ attached forms. Jet seemed warped somehow, his body bent at an odd angle. The metal of his chest looked burned, the way it would if a flamethrower had been aimed at it upward from the hip. Then the two robots passed out of his field of vision and he hurried to meet them in the hangar.

Nigel was the only occupant of the medical ship’s biobay. An instrument cluster hung heavily over his medi-slab, making little uncomfortable noises as it tracked his precariously faint life-signs. Tubes and wires trailed from his body to a variety of other instruments embedded in the walls, whirring and infusing Nigel with artificial life. Katleen sat on the next medi-slab and stared at him. Even though a lavender blue sheet covered his muscled body up to his chest, she could still see, in her mind’s eye, the raw and charred skin under it, a sickening red-black patch of melted dermal cells stretching from his left knee and all over his left side, the radiation burn he had suffered when the ship had turned and pulled out of the radiation field. Nigel had gotten shoved through it in exactly the wrong direction, the open panel in his side — and the only place where he was no longer shielded — facing in the direction of the ship, the radiation flowing in through the hole in his shielding and spreading up to the cockpit and into Nigel’s body. Katleen thought that if Nigel weren’t so deeply unconscious he would be in pain, for which she felt faintly and morbidly grateful. Otherwise she was completely numb. She couldn’t even cry. She wouldn’t let herself, anyway. She would not let herself do anything other than believe Nigel would live.

Katleen was an engineer and didn’t know how to read medical instruments. Consequently she was unsure whether that higher, louder, faster blipping was a sign of reviving systems or an alarm. She looked around, scanning for a doctor, a cold feeling rising in her as she recalled the instances she had heard of where a patient died because of a lack of supervision.

But a doctor stepped in almost immediately, affording her a nod by way of greeting, turning her attention immediately to Nigel and the instruments. Her fingers slid over the panels, and when she turned away there was a brighter expression on her face. Katleen’s spirits rose.

“I have good news, Ms. Plarqis,” the woman — Dr. Dréea Jey, she had said — told Katleen. “He’s stable. He will definitely need dermal grafts, and most of the subcutaneous damage was done to tactile nerve clusters, but he got off easy. There’s no permanent damage, and no chance of losing him now. It was mostly shock and dehydration. He’ll make a complete recovery in two or three weeks.”

“Oh, thank God.” Katleen jumped off the medi-slab and threw her arms around the doctor. “Thank you. Thank you so much. I’ve been waiting to hear that.”

“He’ll be very tired,” Dr. Jey said, returning the embrace. “I suggest you spoil him as much as he can stand.”

“You bet.” Katleen leaned over Nigel’s medi-slab and planted a kiss on his cheek. “I’ll be right here when you wake up,” she whispered. And, as proof, she took a step back and settled herself, cross-legged, on the medi-slab she had been sitting on already for hours.

Dr. Jey stopped at the doorway and came back. “Ms. Plarqis,” she said, “I don’t mind your using a medi-slab as a seat, but I don’t want to have to assign you to it. Please, you should eat something. At least — have a drink?”

Katleen understood the implied offer. She nodded without taking her eyes off Nigel. “Thanks,” she said softly.

Dr. Jey left. A short while later she walked in carrying a steaming vacuum-insulated mug. She gave Katleen the mug and, with a friendly pat to her shoulder, left again.

The liquid was lukewarm when Katleen finally raised it to her lips and took a sip. She had to swallow past the sudden knot that tied itself around her vocal cords and almost kept the hot chocolate from pouring down her throat. Katleen remembered that she had given Nigel a mug of this exact drink not all that long ago. She looked forward to doing so again.

Katleen sat there a long, long time, drinking the chocolate and waiting for Nigel to wake up.